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Forest Service Supports Chattooga Trails (NC/SC/GA)

The Forest Service released their
decision yesterday to move forward with formalizing roughly 1.5 miles of existing
undesignated trails and building less than 1000 feet of new trails to improve access to the Upper
Chattooga River for all visitors.

Roughly 1.2 miles of the trails (the County Line Trail) are nice for hikers, anglers and other
visitors, but have no value as paddling access. The small amount of remaining trails offer
all visitors opportunities to sustainably and enjoyably reach the river and grant paddlers the
access they need to avoid Forest Service river closures.

The Forest Service is right to convert these existing informal trails and river access areas to
sustainable formal trails. It is well within their normal range of management actions and
begins the process of bringing the trail system in the river corridor up to modern standards.
Next we hope they will address the 19 miles of user created trails in the
corridor. The trail decisions are good, but the decisions retain recreational management
judgements that are illogical, biased and needlessly put the public at risk, which is
characteristic of agency management of this river.

The analysis reports that paddling use last year occurred on only 7 days with less than 30 people
descending the river. These use levels, which are far below capacity, are predicted to remain
relatively constant for the foreseeable future. Monitoring revealed no impacts associated
with paddling. Other visitors remain uncounted and are predicted to grow in number.
As expected, the data show that paddling is a non-issue on the Upper Chattooga, undeserving
of the severe Forest Service limits on the activity.